Dr. Bjorn Lomborg, author of "The Skeptical Environmentalist,"
says many environmental organizations' projections about global trends are
exaggerations or myths. He also criticizes journalists for uncritically
repeating the assertions of some groups. The news from environmental
organizations is almost always bleak. The climate is out of whack.
Insidious chemicals taint food and drink. Tropical forests are
disappearing. Species are perishing en masse. Industrial poisons pollute
air, earth and water. Ecosystems are being stressed to the breaking point
by the greedy, wasteful consumption of the Western lifestyle and its
would-be imitators.

So it is a surprise to meet someone who calls himself an
environmentalist but who asserts that things are getting better, that the
rate of human population growth is past its peak, that agriculture is
sustainable and pollution is ebbing, that forests are not disappearing,
that there is no wholesale destruction of plant and animal species and
that even global warming is not as serious as commonly portrayed. Strange
to say, the author of this happy thesis is not a steely-eyed economist at
a conservative Washington think tank but a vegetarian, backpack-toting
academic who was a member of Greenpeace for four years. He is Dr. Bjorn
Lomborg, a 36-year- old political scientist and professor of statistics at
the University of Aarhus in Denmark.

Dr. Lomborg arrived at this position, much to his own astonishment,
through a journey that began in a Los Angeles bookshop in February 1997.
Dr. Lomborg was leafing through an issue of Wired magazine and started
reading an interview with Dr. Julian L. Simon, a University of Maryland
economist who argued in several books that population was unlikely to
outrun natural resources. But Dr. Simon, who died in 1998, is more widely
known for his solution to the airline overbooking problem (having airlines
pay passengers to take a later flight) and for a 1980 bet with Dr. Paul
Ehrlich, president of Stanford University's Center for Conservation
Biology. Dr. Lomborg bet that any five metals chosen by Dr. Ehrlich would
be cheaper in 1990; Dr. Ehrlich lost on all five. Dr. Lomborg felt sure
that Dr. Simon's arguments were "simple American right-wing
propaganda," though presented with enough seriousness that they would
be worth rebutting.

Back in Aarhus, he started nightly study sessions with his statistics
students to debunk Dr. Simon's contentions, using figures drawn from
reports of the World Bank, the Food and Agriculture Organization, the
United States Environmental Protection Agency, the International Panel on
Climate Change and other gatherers of official facts. "Three months
into the project, we were convinced that we were being debunked instead,"
Dr. Lomborg said. "Not everything he said is right. He has a definite
right-wing slant. But most of the important things were actually correct."
Dr. Lomborg has presented his findings in "The Skeptical
Environmentalist," a book to be published in September by Cambridge
University Press. The primary targets of the book, a substantial work of
analysis with almost 3,000 footnotes, are statements made by environmental
organizations like the Worldwatch Institute, the World Wildlife Fund and
Greenpeace.

He refers to the persistently gloomy fare from these groups as the
Litany, a collection of statements that he argues are exaggerations or
outright myths. Dr. Lomborg also chides journalists, saying they
uncritically spread the Litany, and he accuses the public of an unfounded
readiness to believe the worst. "The Litany has pervaded the debate
so deeply and so long," Dr. Lomborg writes, "that blatantly
false claims can be made again and again, without any references, and yet
still be believed." This is the fault not of academic environmental
research, which is balanced and competent, he says, but rather of "the
communication of environmental knowledge, which taps deeply into our
doomsday beliefs."

To understand the world as it is, Dr. Lomborg says, it is necessary to
look at long-term global trends that tell more of the whole story than
short-term trends and are less easy to manipulate. For example, the
Worldwatch Institute, in its 1998 "State of the World" report,
said, "The world's forest estate has declined significantly in both
area and quality in recent decades." But the longest data series of
annual figures available from the United Nations' Food and Agriculture
Organization shows that global forest cover has in fact increased, to
30.89 percent in 1994 from 30.04 percent of global land cover in 1950. The
Worldwatch report goes on to claim that because of soaring demand for
paper, "Canada is losing some 200,000 hectares of forest a year."
The cited reference, however, says that "in fact Canada grew 174,600
more hectares of forest each year," Dr. Lomborg writes. Janet
Abramovitz, Worldwatch's forest expert, said the world forest cover had
shrunk significantly in the last 20 years. She based that contention on a
different, shorter series of Food and Agriculture Organization statistics
but declined to cite a percentage. The institute's figure on Canadian
forest loss was an error, she said.

In its report for 2000, the Worldwatch Institute cited the dangers it
had foreseen in 1984 â "record rates of population
growth, soaring oil prices, debilitating levels of international debt and
extensive damage to forests from the new phenomenon of acid rain" â
and lamented that "we are about to enter a new century having solved
few of these problems." But in his book, Dr. Lomborg cites figures
from the United States Census Bureau, the International Monetary Fund, the
World Bank and the European Environment Agency to show that the rate of
world population growth has actually been dropping sharply since 1964; the
level of international debt decreased slightly from 1984 to 1999; the
price of oil, adjusted for inflation, is half what it was in the early
1980's; and the sulfur emissions that generate acid rain (which has turned
out to do little if any damage to forests, though some to lakes) have been
cut substantially since 1984. In an interview, the president of the
Worldwatch Institute, Christopher Flavin, agreed that progress had been
made in the four problems cited in the institute's 1984 report, but he
said that had been mentioned in other institute reports. "If you read
through our materials as a whole," Mr. Flavin said, "many of
these improvements are acknowledged."

Dr. Lomborg has also been unable to find strong support in the official
statistics for the regular predictions of disaster from Dr. Ehrlich. "In
the course of the 1970's," Dr. Ehrlich wrote in "The Population
Bomb," published in 1968, "the world will experience starvation
of tragic proportions â hundreds of millions of people
will starve to death." Although world population has doubled since
1961, Dr. Lomborg writes, calorie intake has increased by 24 percent as a
whole and by 38 percent in developing countries.

Dr. Lomborg also takes issue with some global warming predictions. In
assessing how waste gases could warm the world's climate, he says, there
are four wild cards that affect the climate change models. One is the
multiplier effect of carbon dioxide â as it heats the
atmosphere a little, the air can hold more water, and that heats the
atmosphere a lot more. How much more is in question, but Dr. Lomborg cites
satellite and weather balloon data that seem to weaken the case for a
strong multiplier effect. The other three wild cards, Dr. Lomborg says,
are the role of clouds, the effect of aerosols and the effect of the
sunspot cycle on earth's climate. Dr. Lomborg believes that when it comes
to computer models of climate change, the International Panel on Climate
Change deals all four wild cards in a way that exaggerates the effect of
greenhouse gases. This means, in his view, that the actual warming will be
at the cooler end of the panel's predicted range. He contends that the
internationally agreed Kyoto targets for reducing carbon dioxide emissions
will impose vast costs for little result. A more effective approach,
according to Dr. Lomborg, would be to increase research on alternative
sources of energy, like solar and fusion. But Dr. Kevin Trenberth of the
National Center for Atmospheric Research said that new satellite data were
likely to point toward a strong multiplier effect for carbon dioxide. And
while Dr. Michael Oppenheimer, an expert on global warming at
Environmental Defense, agrees that clouds and aerosols are still weak
points in the climate models, he says Dr. Lomborg's contention on the
effects of the sunspot cycle is not widely accepted.

As to Dr. Lomborg's policy recommendations, Dr. Oppenheimer said that
investing in technology alone was "like betting the farm on a policy
in which we have less confidence than emissions reduction." In his
view, a broad- based technology push would turn into a pork-barrel program
and be far less efficient than the technology that would develop in
response to a requirement to reduce emissions. "The Skeptical
Environmentalist" portrays several other elements of the Litany as
little more than urban myths. One is the prediction that the world's
forests and a large number of species are headed for catastrophe. Dr.
Lomborg believes that forest loss has been less serious than is often
described â only 20 percent since the dawn of
agriculture, not 67 percent, as stated by the World Wildlife Fund. He also
puts the present annual rate of loss at 0.46 percent, as calculated by the
Food and Agriculture Organization, rather than at 2 percent or more, the
figure cited by many environmentalists. Given that the forests are not
doing that badly, he is skeptical of claims that the world is about to
lose half or more of its species. The often quoted figure that 40,000
species are lost every year comes from a 1979 article by Dr. Norman Myers,
an ecologist at Oxford University. But this figure, Dr. Lomborg says, was
not based on any evidence, just on Dr. Myers's conjecture that one million
species might be lost from 1975 to 2000, which works out to be 40,000
species a year.

The International Union for the Conservation of Nature, which maintains
the Red Book of endangered species, concluded in 1992 that the extinction
figures for mammals and birds were "very small" and that the
total extinction rate, assuming 30 million species, was probably 2,300
species a year. Nonetheless, Dr. Lomborg says, Dr. Myers repeated his
estimate in 1999 with a warning that "we are into the opening stages
of a human- caused biotic holocaust." Dr. Myers confirmed in an
interview that the figure of 40,000 extinctions a year had come from his
estimate. He said that it was an illustration used to make his argument
clear and that he gave figures only "when I am speaking to a
political leader or policy maker who says that in order to sell his
message, he absolutely must have some number." The International
Union for the Conservation of Nature's estimate was too low, Dr. Myers
said, because it considered a species extinct only after none of its
members had been sighted for 50 years. "All I am trying to do is to
demonstrate that we are in the opening phase of a mass extinction,"
he said.

Though no longer a member of Greenpeace, Dr. Lomborg still counts
himself as an environmentalist and portrays his critique as based on the
outlook of a leftist. "I'm a left- wing guy," he says, "and
a vegetarian because I don't want to kill animals â you
can't play the `he's right- wing so he's wrong' argument." He
believes that the environment must be protected and that regulation is
often necessary. But exaggerating problems distorts society's priorities,
he says, and makes it hard for society to make the best decisions. Writing
about environmentalists, he says, "The worse they can portray the
environment, the easier it is for them to convince us that we need to
spend more money on the environment rather than on hospitals, child day
care, etc."

Those who abandon long-held faiths are often strident advocates of their
new views. But Dr. Lomborg displays little of the convert's zeal. His aim
is not to preach free-market solutions for every problem or to deny that
threats to the environment exist. His motive, he says, is simply to
document that the facts, in his view, tell a far brighter story than the
Litany. Thomas Malthus argued in 1798 that population growth was certain
to outrun food supply. As Dr. Lomborg sees it, Malthus's gloomy
predictions still hold an iron grip over many minds, and are still wrong.